Today at the MSR Faculty Summit – I was able to play with the Sphere Project, and it’s a real unique way to interact with information/data. It makes you think what data could be place in a system like this and how to interact with it. We’ll...

PHP developers can now integrate data from SQL Server now that the driver is available for download . Also glad to see that it works with SQL Server Express edition. It is my pleasure to announce that version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005...

One thing a lot of people complain about web mapping applications is having to create tiles to be able to overlay images as new map layers. Tiling is boring, time consuming and pointless if all you have is a 100 KB image (not images of different details...

One of the discussions that frequently happens at the eScience/Science 2.0 type meetings is how does academia incorporate the Web 2.0 technologies (Blogging, etc) into the tenure based reward system - these are technologies that change how quickly/accessible...

It's really good to see that the datamining work ( ProDA ) that Cyrus Shahabi of USC is getting more visibility - the use of wavelet compression is a really neat way to deal with large amounts of data and make it easy to see the trends...you can see why...

.NetMap an Excel plugin and dll is now available (Binaries and Source) on CodePlex – This brings the ability to visualize different types of networks – ie. Social networks (facebook, etc) and even things like Protein interaction network (see image...

Wish I was creative enough to create a Xbox LIVE Community Games and not only get fame - but fortune :-) I'd be interested in seeing some Science or environment related games up there - might be a way to educate as well as have fun. Once the...

Just received the Sectoral Applications Research Program announcement from Nancy Beller-Simms at the NOAA Climate Program Office. The due date for the proposal is 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time October 9, 2008. The overall NOAA 2009 Climate Program Announcement...

Very interesting article in current issue of Science... The United States faces unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead. Foremost among them will be climate change, sea-level rise, altered weather patterns, declines in...

Just ran across the NGO Connection site – this is the place for non-profit orgs in the scientific space to look into…. NGO Connection is an online resource for non-profit groups around the world that provides resources to help advance the causes of the...

Carol Minton Morris has a good entry on the HatCheck Newsletter on Alex Szalay's keynote, “Scientific Publishing in the Era of Pedabyte Data,” at JCDL on June 19, 2008. I always enjoy listening to Alex and hearing his perspective, especially...

Here are some good articles on Environmental Science related activities that our researchers at Microsoft Research are involved with. Understanding Climate Change—One Tree at a Time How Can Technology Sustain the Environment in the 21st Century...